Direct kinematics of planar parallel manipulators

Abstract

We address the problem of finding all the solutions of the direct kinematics for every possible architectures of planar fully parallel manipulators. We show that for this problem all the possible kinematic chains can be reduced to a set of three basic chains and we explain how to calculate the solutions of the forward kinematics for all the combinations of these basic chains and consequently for all the possible architectures of planar parallel robots.